Facebook's future – if it is to meet the increasingly inflated aspirations of its 'incentivised' investors – is to use a combination of its scale and the acres of intimate information it holds about all of us to find the real money in targeted advertising. The strategy is to gradually open our personal data more and more, making open information the norm, desensitising us to any uncomfortable feelings we might have had about our personal data being released into the wild. In a few years, we'll have no qualms at all about getting our home address out there. Perhaps.This makes Eric Schmidt's comments about being responsible for what we share more prescient. The moral of the story: if Facebook does a crappy job of enforcing access control then bad for Facebook in the long run, but it's more about our minimizing how much we share; basically the providers aren't going to make things private on your behalf. Then again I don't assume that my home address and mobile phone are not private, I'm sure they are on some public directory someplace. It's what my friend Peter O'Kelly calls social media literacy and that we are the IT department of our lives.
Facebook: Now sharing your home address with developers | Technology | guardian.co.uk
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